Fond farewell to Mars Global Surveyor
It operated for 4 times longer than expected and returned a stunning array of data, but on November 2nd 2006, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft made its last call home to Earth. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has now released the preliminary conclusions of a report by an internal review board, and it appears the reason for the failure may have its origins in a computer mistake made 5 months previously. A routine update in September 2005 sent to onboard computers caused inconsistencies in the spacecraft's memory. When engineers tried to fix the problem they compounded the error by sending further incorrect software commands, and then did not catch these new mistakes because the existing procedures to do so were inadequate.
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